Where Winds Meet

After nearly 120 games, here’s my honest review. This is a really good game, with an incredible amount of things to do. There’s honestly never a shortage of content. The graphics are beautiful, and the variety of combat makes the gameplay really enjoyable. I’ve played around 160 hours, and I had a great time with it. However, once you get busy or simply don’t have enough time to play, the game can become an absolute nightmare. You have to spend so much time doing specific tasks like gathering materials, buying items, preparing for activities, and so on. At some point, it feels like 90% of the game is just doing these chores rather than actually playing. Later on, I even ended up logging in just to fight the boss every day because I simply didn’t have the time to deal with everything else. Overall, this is a great game if you have plenty of free time. But if you’re a busy person, the amount of things you have to keep up with can become extremely exhausting and turn the game into a chore. Great game, but very demanding of your time.

[h3]Added context: I primarily played this casually and mostly avoided PvP beyond the early days and casual GvG[/h3] [i]+ is good, - is bad, ~ is neutral[/i] [h2]Visual[/h2] + Has great aesthetics for map, character and cosmetic design. caveat below* - *The female versions of clearly male-intended designs (like full body armor) are lazy (personal gripe) + The themes are great. Really good for people who love taking photos of their characters + Boss designs are great. [h2]Audio[/h2] + It's pretty good. ~ It's only pretty good. Nothing really sticks. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] + The core combat design is fun. It's basically Temu Sekiro. + Boss designs are pretty fun. + PvP is fun. I can't say if it's balanced, but it is fun and has depth to it. RPS mindgames. ~ The way the game is meant to be structured kind of means the progression of difficulty fluctuates. ~ Exploration is mostly just clearing checkmarks, a la Ubisoft, but the world's aesthetics makes it passable, a la Ubisoft. - There's a lot of minigames and all of them are copy pasted from other popular games without understanding what makes them good, instead of focusing on improving the core of the game. - You are basically required to join a guild to get the most out of the game's timegates. [h2]Microtransactions and cosmetics[/h2] + Good design philosophy. - Expensive gacha, as expected. - Everything is overpriced. - Rewards for accomplishments are basically nothing. They exist, but are nothing compared to spending money. [h2]Special mention: PROGRESSION[/h2] It's awful. The worst in any game I've ever played, including 2005 Maplestory where level cap would take literal years. There are catch-up mechanics, but they designed the skill system (for your builds) to require EXORBITANT amounts of time to reach the peak capacity of any given build. It stifles new players and makes getting a second build going on an old account excessively annoying. At the amount of hours I have, playing since basically the launch, I have only two builds on one character. Which I cannot even get the right gear for quickly for both with each level update because it's pure RNG rolling on top of RNG rolling. I've basically only ever played two builds in this game. The only other way to try different builds is to convert your skill levels, but again, you still only have so many points. So if you wanna keep your original skill points in your build, you're time-gated to it. [h2]Other Stuff[/h2] + Building exists in this game but it's super clunky. It's decent, though? Not worth the headaches for me to maneuver through it. + The game is built around chores, mostly weekly, a few easy dailies, but the payoff is pretty bad for most of it. - UI is bad - Performance has degraded with each patch - The game's filesize is 170GB right now. - Events are basically all the same thing, monotonous and uninteresting. ~ There's a lot of promo codes to find, all of them give basically nothing and it's actually a nightmare to type them all in. ~ Writing is a hit or miss, with mostly misses for me. It hits when it hits, but the English VA's don't do it well enough. Use CN VAs. Problem is the hits are usually not main story beats. The story is mostly convoluted as hell, but it fits the vibes of the theme it's going for, which also tends to have that, though I'm no expert. [h1][u]Conclusion[/u][/h1] I wouldn't recommend the game unless you really vibe with the gameplay loop and just really love the aesthetics. Also that you don't mind spending some money or acknowledging that people will always look more fly than you. Or if you do spend money and realize some people will look INFINITELY more fly because there's a lot of ♥♥♥♥ they let you spend money on.

好死，早日倒闭

the game is just mid at everything it does, also cant exuse any use of AI

[h1]( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)[/h1]

This is why we read the entire steam store description before downloading the game. Downloaded this per recommendations of some other tumblrites, was amazed by the character creator and general "vibe" of everything, only to be punched in the throat with the fact that basically every NPC interaction is essentially CharacterAI. Upon further inspection there is AI just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everywhere in this game, and I'm a person that flinches like an abused dog upon seeing AI in any creative work because of how much it's flooded all my other hobbies and interests with garbage. In all fairness there is a disclaimer (that I didn't see because I'm an idiot) (that the devs also basically had to be told to put there because according to previous reviews it didn't originally have an AI disclaimer). Hire actual people or don't bother making a video game.

This is a great game, but it's being ruined by the developers' lack of responsibility. The game is full of balance issues and bugs, yet after more than six months, almost none of them have been addressed. Here's one example of the balance problems. In the bounty mode, what weapon do you think is used the most? A sword? A blade? A spear? No—it's the fan. For some reason, healing is reduced in every other PvP mode, but not in bounty hunts. As a result, you end up with players who have what feels like endless healing. Some players even deliberately commit crimes just to become wanted and lure bounty hunters to them. They know that if the hunter isn't using a healer build, they'll almost certainly win. If the hunter is also a healer, the fight usually drags on until the timer runs out. It's a toxic and unhealthy gameplay loop. Then there are the bugs. In the Inheritance Challenge, during the final stage against the Nameless General, the boss turns invisible in roughly 3 out of every 10 attempts. Many players, including myself, have recorded videos and reported the issue, but nothing has been done. It feels like the developers are more interested in selling skins than fixing their game. :)

I have no idea what this game is trying to be, design chooses all out of places, too many key buttons for simple task, like block and deflect attack , so instead of combining these functions into one function like many other games, this game makes you press different keyboard keys, and I haven't even mentioned other bad control design choices, game controls are not fully optimized, its super bloated. The game tries to do everything, you have standard light/heavy attacks, dodging, parrying, and deflecting. But then you also have to manage multiple weapon swaps and etc. Cheap and bad mmo ui, boring and very slow paced story, questionable world design, is this fantasy game or more traditional chinese world, This mix of a realistic, historical setting with over-the-top, superhero-like magic is feels realy out of place, this game published by NetEase, they design characters and cosmetics to appeal to a broad audience. Successful games succeed because of aesthetic discipline—they treat fantasy as a natural, grounded extension of historical folklore and strictly control how the world looks. Where Winds Meet fails because it has no focus. It tries to force flashy, superhero-style combat and clean, modern live-service cosmetics into a gritty, realistic 10th-century setting, resulting in a jarring visual and mechanical clashIt creates a visual clash that ruins the immersion. This game is tryng to be mmo, but then it's tryng to be zelda, genshin etc. It's trying to be everything but ending up being nothing.

I will never condone the use of gen AI in any capacity.